so ive been running FT8 for a while now and i get it, its great for contacts and the weak signal performance is genuinely impressive, ive worked some stuff on 20m with maybe 5 watts that i never would have gotten on SSB. but theres always been this nagging thing where you make the contact and then... thats it. its like shaking hands through a fence. you confirmed each other exist, great, moving on.

anyway a buddy at the club kept going on about JS8Call and i finally installed it last weekend. took me a good hour to figure out the flow because its not as polished as WSJT-X obviously but once i got it i actually had a real back and forth with a guy in Finland for like 20 minutes. slow as hell compared to SSB but the signal was buried in the noise and we were both running QRP. i dont know, something about it felt more like actual ham radio to me.

my question i guess is whether anyone has found a good balance between running FT8 for the raw contact numbers and using JS8Call when you actually want to talk to someone. feels like they serve completely different purposes even though the underlying tech is similar. also does anyone still run PSK31 or is that basically dead now outside of contests

yeah you pretty much nailed the difference. FT8 is optimized for one thing and it does that one thing incredibly well but its not a conversational mode by design, Franke and Taylor built it for chasing DX and contests not ragchewing. JS8Call is KD8CEC's attempt to take that weak signal foundation and bolt actual messaging onto it and honestly for what it is i think he did a solid job.

i run both depending on what i want out of a session. if band conditions are garbage and i want to see whats actually out there ill fire up FT8, if i actually want to have a conversation with someone at low power on a quiet night JS8Call is genuinely fun. the relay functionality where messages can hop through other stations is something i havent seen work reliably yet but in theory its cool.

PSK31 isnt dead but its definitely quieter than it was ten years ago. 14.070 still has some activity most evenings, the decoding is satisfying in a different way because youre watching the waterfall and picking out signals with your eyes before the software gets them. theres a tactile feel to it that FT8 just doesnt have. RTTY is similar, still alive in contests especially, CQWW RTTY gets pretty busy.

js8call kind of clicked for me when i stopped thinking of it as slow FT8 and started thinking of it as like... asynchronous radio texting almost. i leave it running sometimes when im doing other stuff and check back to see if anyone left a message. the store and forward stuff is hit or miss but the direct conversations work fine once both sides are patient with the timing.

one thing that tripped me up early on was dial frequency, make sure youre on the right one for your region or youll just be sitting there wondering why nobody responds. theres a handful of calling frequencies that have actual activity and everything else is pretty dead.